Monday, May 15, 2006

See No Evil

The business on this movie will be interesting to see. This has been marketed everywhere, and with very little to no reference to the fact it is a WWE film. The key to business will be if people figure it out in time for the weekend or not. "Horror film featuring WWE wrestler" is just a total death sentence for a movie, but I'm not sure if people realize it or not. There will no doubt be a sharp dropoff after the first week. I'll go ahead and predict an opening weekend gross of $5M. That's pretty decent, because I think WWE has set up a good smokescreen as far as what the movie is.

6 Comments:

Dan said...

5M sounds about right. Although I doubt many high-schoolers will pick See No Evil over the Da Vinci Code & Poseidon. Might not be too many screens available with Da Vinci and Over the Hedge opening this weekend. They should have pushed it back till the fall. The funniest part will be seeing on they try to spin the box office results on Monday.

I don't think there's that many high schoolers lining up to see the Da Vinci Code... Tom Hanks hasn't really bene much of a teen actor since 'Big'. DVC likely appeals to a slightly elder demo then 12-18.

I don't think See No Evil breaks $3M as there's too much competition out there for it to do much of anything. Although most of the competition out there is a bunch of tripe, still it's not like See No Evil is the second coming of The Shining.

One thing is for sure they have done an excellent job of marketing on the movie. The whole May 19th thing with Kane and the voices, no matter how stupid it was, was a great idea to get the date into people's heads. However I'll think I'll wait to see it on DVD.

A telling point of reference to me is how comparably marketed horror films have done recently. Since Saw II did shockingly good business last winter, horror films have been some of Hollywood's most bankable theatrical films. Just this year, here are how horror films have done the first week:

Those numbers are actually very promising for See No Evil, if the ads have convinced audiences that this film is like those others. The x-factor really is the WWE affiliation, which I think is a huge turnoff to the greater public. I think the worst thing for WWE might be this film doing really well, and Vince then concluding that this means WWE films are a success and budgeting for 10 more films starring Trish Stratus in a romantic comedy, Ken Kennedy in a drama, Umaga in an adventure and so on.

I don't know if anybody here plays, or has even heard of, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, but their version of the over/under line for the film was $5M. The call for that has gone up a bit, and the put has gone down. So HSX users seem to think that the film will exceed $5M, and really, $7M. This whole paragraph makes a lot more sense if you use HSX.com.

I know my roommate and I plan on seeing See No Evil, but mainly because we each have a half dozen movie passes to use this summer, and DaVinci Code is No Passes. I'm sure it will be terrible, but in a summer that is offering us MI3 and Poseidon, I don't think See No Evil will be considered the worst of the bunch.